Be fair, Enron, pay ex-workers full severance

E. DALE WORTHAM

Published 6:30 am, Wednesday, February 20, 2002

Gwen Gray
is one of the nearly 5,000
Enron
employees who was suddenly thrown out of work with the energy company's historic collapse. Ironically, Gray helped issue checks for as much as $30,000 to $40,000 to more than 30 company analysts and traders just weeks before the bottom fell out.

Later, she found out the checks were only a small part of the $105 million in retention bonuses that key employees and top executives received as the company was going under. For Gray and her co-workers, the rank-and-file workers whose hard work and loyalty helped Enron prosper over the years, there have been no bonuses.

In fact, they're lucky if they've received an extremely minimal $4,500 severance payment Enron has been handing out to those who have been laid off. Receiving a full and fair severance package is the least Enron can do for its former workers at this point. With their retirement savings lost in Enron's collapse, many of them are now jobless, struggling to pay their bills and keep their families together.

At least some 300 employees already have fallen through the cracks of Enron's faulty accounting system and have yet to received a dime in severance. Nearly 4,500 have received only the company's limited severance payment. We're heartened that Enron's interim chief executive officer, Stephen Cooper, has now agreed to our request that these workers who have received nothing will get at least the minimum that the others have been given. But an even bigger step will be winning for all Enron workers the full severance compensation that Enron's employee manual guaranteed them.

They were promised one week of severance pay for each year of service and a week's salary for every $10,000 in annual salary. They earned at least that much and, to be blunt about it, they probably deserve it a lot more than the scores of top executives who cashed in with gigantic bonuses and raises just days before the bankruptcy.

Paying Enron's workers the full severance they are due would finally strike a blow for simple fairness -- not only Enron employees but also working men and women everywhere.

Fairness to workers, sadly, is a value that's been severely tarnished in Enron's collapse, as greed devoured the corporate board room and disregard for the company's workers became commonplace among Enron's leaders. Yet Enron is just the latest metaphor for troubling corporate culture in America that too many times in the last two decades has celebrated avarice in the executive suites and ignored what is good for workers.

The mentality too often for more than a few corporate leaders seems to be, "line your pockets while the getting is good." Just one example is the ever more lavish executive pay across the corporate world.

In 2000, for instance, at the same time that the stock market was sliding and companies were falling short of projected earnings, the average CEO of a major U.S. corporation received a record-breaking $20 million, including nearly 50 percent more stock options and 22 percent more in salary and bonus.

Today, the inequality between workers and company executives is at an all-time high. In 1980, the average CEO made 42 times the average blue-collar worker's pay in 1980, 85 times in 1990 and an outrageous 531 times in 2000.

No, guaranteeing Enron's employees the severance pay they earned won't reverse that larger trend. But it will strike a blow for fairness to workers that is long overdue.